'Bacterial census' finds a zoo full of critters on human skin

Thu May 28, 6:18 PM

By Lauran Neergaard, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Eeeww. There's a zoo full of critters living on your skin - a bacterial zoo, that is. Consider your underarm a rain forest.

Healthy skin is home to a much wider variety of bacteria than scientists ever knew, says the first big census of our co-inhabitants.

And that's not a bad thing, said genetics specialist Julia Segre of the National Institutes of Health, who led the research.

Sure they make your sneakers stinky, "but they also keep your skin moist and make sure if you get a wound that (dangerous) bacteria don't enter your bloodstream," she said. "We take a lot for granted in terms of how much they contribute to our health."

People's bodies are ecosystems, believed home to trillions of bacteria, fungi and other microbes that naturally coexist in the skin, the digestive tract and other spots. But scientists don't have a good grasp of which microbes live where, much less which are helpful, even indispensable, in maintaining health.

The NIH's "Human Microbiome Project" aims to change that, recruiting healthy volunteers to learn what microbes they harbour so scientists can compare the healthy with diseases of microbes gone awry - from acute infections to mysterious conditions like psoriasis or irritable bowel syndrome.

The skin research, published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, is part of that project. Scientists decoded the genes of 112,000 bacteria in samples taken from a mere 20 spots on the skin of 10 people. Those numbers translated into roughly 1,000 strains, or species, of bacteria, Segre said, hundreds more than ever have been found on skin largely because the project used newer genetic techniques to locate them.

Topography matters, a lot, the researchers reported. If a moist, hairy underarm is like a rain forest, the dry inside of the forearm is a desert. They harbour distinctly different bacteria suited to those distinctly different environments. In fact, the bacteria under two unrelated people's underarms are more similar than the bacteria that lives on one person's underarm and forearm.

Mom's advice to wash behind your ears notwithstanding, that spot contained the least diverse bacteria - 19 species on average. The most diverse spot: the forearm, which averaged 44 species.

How many are supposed to live there? That's not clear yet. Some certainly could be tourists, picked up as we go about our day. When researchers re-checked five of these volunteers a few months later, the bacteria in some spots - the moist nostril and groin, for example - proved pretty stable while other spots, including the forearm, had changed quite a bit.

Which are good bugs, and which bad? That depends. A common skin bacteria is Staph epidermidis, found all over the body. Segre said it helps protect us from its nasty cousin, Staph aureus, which about a third of people are thought to carry on the skin or in their nose even if they have no active infection.

But, back to topography, Staph epidermidis itself can harm if it gets under the skin; it's a common trigger of catheter-caused infections.

The research helps lay the groundwork for what doctors really want to know: What's different in the skin of people with diseases such as eczema or psoriasis? Those studies are about to begin, says Dr. Martin Blaser of New York University Langone Medical Center, who is leading one on psoriasis and performed some first-step studies of skin bacteria that helped lead to the NIH's census.

Then there's the scrubbing question, society's antibacterial obsession.

"There's an all-out assault on our normal skin organisms," Blaser noted. "In trying to get rid of the bad guys, are we getting rid of the good guys?"

Segre hopes knowing there are so many bacteria alters how people think about the relationship.

"I'm a mother of two small children; I believe very strongly in sanitation, washing your hands," Segre said. But, "we have to understand that we live in harmony with bacteria and they are part of us as super-organisms . . . and not just conceive of bacteria as bad and germs and smelly."

Lonely robots ignored by elderly luddites
8:51AM Friday Sep 21, 2007
By Emi Foulk


TOKYO - Ifbot, the resident robot at a Japanese nursing home, can converse, sing, express emotions and give trivia quizzes to seniors to help with their mental agility. Yet the pale-green gizmo has spent much of the past two years languishing in a corner alone.

"The residents liked ifbot for about a month before they lost interest," said Yasuko Sawada, director of the facility in Kyoto, western Japan, shaking her head as she contemplated the 495,000 yen ($NZ5860), 45-cm-tall (18-inch-tall) "communication robot".

"Stuffed animals are more popular," she remarked dryly.

High-tech gadgets and futuristic robots which Japan had hoped might lend a hand when the population turns grey haven't caught on with the elderly, who according to forecasts will make up around 40 per cent of the population by the middle of the century.

"Most (elderly) people are not interested in robots. They see robots as overly-complicated and unpractical. They want to be able to get around their house, take a bath, get to the toilet and that's about it," said Ruth Campbell, a geriatric social worker at the University of Tokyo.

Japanese manufacturers have learned the hard way that the elderly want everyday products adapted to their needs - easy to read for those with poor eyesight, big buttons for people with trembling hands and clear audio for the hard of hearing.

Among the most high-profile failures was Hopis, a furry pink dog-like robot capable of monitoring blood sugar, blood pressure and body temperature.

Faced with poor sales, its manufacturer Sanyo stopped production of the robot dog and instead focused on utilitarian devices for the elderly such as height-adjustable countertops and phones with jumbo-sized keys.

Not all high-tech products aimed at seniors have disappeared, though many are hardly blockbusters.

Kitchenware maker Zojirushi Corp. offers the i-pot, an electric kettle equipped with a radio transmitter that sends email twice a day to relatives to let them know if Grandma has made tea. Some 3,300 of the devices are in use across Japan.

Secom Co.'s My Spoon, an automatic feeding device for those whose hands are too shaky to eat on their own, is available in Japan and the Netherlands. Two hundred have been sold, including 150 in Japan, since it first went on the market in 2002.

High production costs and difficulty of use make it hard to sell specialty electronics to seniors, according to Mieko Ohsuga, a biomedical engineer specialising in geriatrics at Osaka Institute of Technology.

"When talking about how to market more complex products, we keep coming up against the same problems," she said. "They are costly to create, require supervision to use, and in the end the manpower issue is not solved. We can see things work, but who is going to pay the expense?"

It won't be the elderly themselves, at least for now.

"They just want simpler phones and tools," said Dr. Kanao Tsuji, a geriatrician with Life Care System, a home visit health care provider.

- REUTERS

Dr. Webb Haymaker cutting into Benito Mussolini's brain. Published in Life magazine. Old MAMAS 518.

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